If you happen to be at Mix and want to chat about Windows Media Center head over to the Sandbox area and ask for Eric Voetberg, Jason Suess or Andrew Adamyk. While there you can pick up a DVD chock full of resources for those wanting to learn more about developing for Windows Media Center in managed code and / or Media Center Markup Language. It includes the latest rev of the SDK (it's already posted to MSDN online and will be going up to the download center in the next day or two) as well as some fairly extensive training materials.

You can watch the Joe Belfiore keynote from Mix06 (streaming) via the following link.

http://metahost.savvislive.com/microsoft/20060321/mix_belfiore_20060321_100.asx

The whole thing is nothing but goodness so I highly encourage you to watch everything. For those of you interested in the Windows Media Center portion...

41:50 Introduction and demo of currently shipping version of Windows Media Center running on XBox 360, including Comedy Central experience featured in Online Spotlight.

54:15 Demo of Windows Media Center in Windows Vista.

1:01:15 Demo of the 'Q' Windows Media Center Podcast Client SDK Sample Windows Media Center Presentation Layer Application.

1:04:10 Demo of the NASCAR interactive experience using WinFX (WPF and WCF).

Enjoy!

As Aaron notes, the Q application will be included in Joe Belfiores keynote and shown by myself and Stephen Toub while at Mix06. We've been subscribing to various and sundry feeds to test things out -- now it's time to decide what to put into the Q:Helix.

Nominate yourself or others in the comments, with a pointer to the RSS (not HTML) feed. Who knows, your content might be showcased on stage in front of all the attendees at Mix06, demonstrated by JoeB himself. :-)

As part of the ongoing 7 minute 20 second conversation pieces towards a 72 hour conversation at Mix06 here we present MIX06: The Digital Home.

Thanks to Ron Pessner (Senior Director, Windows eHome) who literally last minute agreed to be caught on film with me -- brave, brave soul. Best quote: 'A truly compelling value prop for consumers' at 6:51 from Ron speaking about Windows Media Center and Media Center Extender for XBox 360. I couldn't agree more (although I can't actually say that phrase well yet -- my brain doesn't seem to want to string those syllables together as nicely.

Things have been super busy the last couple of weeks...

Schematic is doing the design for the 'Q' application and will collaborate with our team to implement the visuals using Media Center Markup Language. Kate Wojogbe and Peng Lee will be co-presenting with us at Mix06 at the 'Design' and 'Developer' sessions respectively. I'm super excited they get to come out from 'behind the scenes' to showcase their talent -- many of the best applications in Online Spotlight exist as a result of their great work. They sent over the design concepts for 'Q' this evening. Impressive, to say the least. I'll post the designs once we tweak them a bit more.

Stephen Toub is also joining us on the project, focusing on the managed code side of the equation. Stephen is freakin' brilliant, and can communicate his brilliance to dolts like myself via his wonderful articles and resources like Fun with DVR-MS, Time Travel with Media Center and DVR-MS: Adventures in Closed Captioning. The best thing about what Stephen writes: it's fundamentally usable by developers and consumers.

I sat down with a piece of graph paper at McDonalds today for lunch (Value Meal #2 which is a Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese sans onions, fries, Coca-Cola, plus three chocolate chip cookies) to sketch out the Mix06 project.

I named the app 'Q' until we can come up with something better. It can stand for a couple of things which seem to be appropriate: cue and queue.

Here is a sneak preview of the feature set / goals along with priority.

• Browse potential and subscribed content. (p1)
• Subscribe to content. (p1)
• Download content to local machine. (p1)
• Play content from local machine. (p1)
• Support RSS 2.0 required Channel elements. (p1)
   Title, Link, Description
• Support RSS 2.0 required Item element. (p1)
   Title (or Description)
• Support RSS 2.0 Item optional elements required for app to function. (p1)
   Enclosure (+ 3 required attributes of location, size and mime type).
   GUID (unique string for feed)

• Support optional elements of RSS 2.0 Channel. (p2)
   Language, copyright, image (+ 3 required elements of url, title and link), category
• Support optional elements of RSS 2.0 Item. (p2)
   Description, author, category, pubDate

• Manage subscriptions. (p3)
• Support Media Center native formats for playback: WMA, MP3, WMV, MPEG1, MPEG2 (p3)
   We get this for free, but I'm spelling it out anyway so we know specifically what formats will be supported.

Priority Legend

p1 = Must Have
p2 = Nice To Have
p3 = Cool if we get, but won't go above and beyond to implement.

There will be some expansion of these features once we start getting into the UI design -- for example, browse will probably include some notion of grouping / categorization. I hope to publish the full spec before the end of the week.

Keep the comments / feature requests coming -- we haven't locked anything down yet so there is still time to add or change features.

Well, it's time to get started on the project we want to demo at Mix06. We are going to put together a podcast / videoblog client for Media Center written as a Media Center Add In with the user interface coded in Media Center Markup Language (MCML).  Chances are this puppy will be released 'out into the wild' at some point.

What favorite features do you want us to include?

Posted over on Media Center Sandbox: http://blog.mediacentersandbox.com/PermaLink,guid,9c4e4630-5e10-4177-8bab-b30adc28dce1.aspx

I'll be presenting various Media Center technologies, design and development at Mix06. Joe Belfiore has been announced as one of the keynote speakers. The Mix team has an RSS feed, just posted a session outline as well as agenda.

What's Mix you might ask? You might think of it as a more targeted version of the Professional Developers Conference specifically for the web with specific tracks tailored for designers, developers and business folks.